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Law360 (April 29, 2020, 6:32 PM EDT ) A New York judge asked a federal prison in Manhattan to provide details on its response to the COVID-19 pandemic on Wednesday after a group of inmates claimed the facility is failing to protect their health.
Five inmates sued the warden at the Metropolitan Correctional Center on behalf of their fellow inmates, alleging the prison is violating their rights by not taking adequate precautions to assess and slow the spread of the novel coronavirus at the facility. Judge Edgardo Ramos said Wednesday the inmates' requests that he order the prison to expand testing for the virus and release more eligible inmates were "eminently reasonable."
During a telephone hearing, the judge ordered the prison to report back by Friday on what it had done in terms of testing inmates for the virus, providing sanitation supplies and masks to inmates and staff, and releasing some inmates as directed by Attorney General William Barr.
Arlo Devlin-Brown of Covington & Burling LLP, who represents the proposed class of inmates, questioned why the prison has only tested around seven of the 700 inmates in the facility when the state is testing tens of thousands of people per day.
"This should not be hard two months into this crisis," he said.
Assistant U.S. Attorney J.D. Barnea sought time to assess the situation and told the judge he had heard on Wednesday morning that the facility now has some in-house testing capacity.
Judge Ramos pressed Barnea as to whether any inmates have been released to home confinement, as Barr instructed the Bureau of Prisons to do in late March in order to thin the prison population. The inmates who sued the warden say they don't know of anyone who has been released from the MCC under that guidance.
Barnea replied that judges are in charge of deciding whether to release the 500 or so inmates who are being held pending trial, and that the remaining prisoners are able to petition the Bureau of Prisons or the judges who handled their cases for release.
Judge Ramos said he and his colleagues on the bench sometimes feel they have been doing nothing but fielding such requests in recent weeks, and that "a number of us have indicated our frustration with the fact that that process is so cumbersome."
The judge said the BOP is best positioned to gauge whether inmates are eligible for release and wanted to know whether it has done so for those at the MCC.
"To the extent that is not happening, or not happening quickly within the MCC, it is a cause of concern," the judge said.
The Manhattan inmates are represented by Arlo Devlin-Brown, Alan Vinegrad, Andrew A. Ruffino, Timothy C. Sprague and Ishita Kala of Covington & Burling LLP.
The warden is represented by Jean-David Barnea, Allison Rovner and Jessica Hu of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York.
The case is Fernandez-Rodriguez et al. v. Licon-Vitale, case number 1:20-cv-03315, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
--Editing by Marygrace Murphy.
For a reprint of this article, please contact reprints@law360.com.
